[olingern]

If Zulip became an overnight success, five to seven years from now I see them making similar changes. Resources cost money and Slack achieved what it needed to in order to establish itself as the dominant company in the space.

If anything, this will allow for some meaningful competition

[kareemsabri]

Slack isn't dominant. They sold to Salesforce because they couldn't beat Microsoft on distribution in the enterprise, and saw the writing on the wall.

I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What resources will be saved by this change?

[Karunamon]

Slack only lost because of Microsoft using their near-monopoly in one space to take over another. Almost like this is a pattern of behavior for them.

Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is. It could never survive in the marketplace on its own merits.

[kareemsabri]

Teams is horrible, of course. Like I said, Microsoft won cause of enterprise market dominance.

[bachmeier]

> Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is.

That's why Microsoft won. It's better than Slack for the people that make the purchase decisions. Who cares what the users think if they're not the ones that make that decision.

[williamstein]

One difference is that Zulip is 100% open source, whereas Slack is not.

[stavros]

I can self-host Zulip, so I don't care what they do, as long as they're alive.